I'm consulting at a facility where they have 2 G-Speed XL 16TB FC RAIDs. They are about 4 years old. Each RAID has 16 drives of 1 TB each. The drives are Hitachi SATA drives model HDT721010SLA360.

I'm wondering, can I give this RAID a new lease of life by replacing all of these with newer 2 TB or even 3 TB or 4 TB drives? Does G-Tech supply these any more? Or can I simply replace them myself? What other drive make/models are supported in this RAID. The existing drives are all 3 Gbps SATA with 16MB cache. Would newer 6 Gbps drives with larger caches work?

The RAIDs are in Mumbai, India. And out here Hitachi or Seagate drives are easily obtained.

Thanks for posting. If you are running the fiber channel version the cap is 2TB drives. If you care running the SAS version then it is dependent on the controller card you are using. Our SAS card does support 3 and 4 TB drives. You can change the drives yourself. Just make sure you keep the sled that each drive mounts in.

Thanks for posting. The G-Speed FC (6 bay) has no way to increase capacity, 2TB per drive is the limit. For the XL unit the fiber channel and sas units use different controllers and interfaces for connecting to the chassis. They cannot be swapped.

We no longer sell the modules for the G-Speed XL or FC. You can purchase bare drives and swap them into the existing sleds for the unit. We do not sell the bare drives directly so you would want to look into a vendor or distributor for procurement.